Polysemic Hercules: Gustave Moreau & Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Moreau owned a French edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Pierre du Ryer in 1660. This text was a significant source for Moreau’s painting, Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra (1875-76). I offer a close reading of Ovid’s Hercules cycle in relation to the artistic choices and meaning of Moreau’s painting. When Ovidian themes are understood in relation to Moreau’s Hercules, connections can be made between this painting and its companions, Salome Dancing before Herod and The Apparition, both of which Moreau debuted with Hercules in the Salon of 1876 and the Exposition Universelle of 1878. Conceived together, these three images juxtapose masculine virtue versus feminine vice. Although Moreau explored dichotomous and essentializing typologies in these works, his more personal drawings and studies are ambiguous. This imagery hints at the artist’s attempts to find meaning by exploring the spaces in between the very binarily-defined typologies that his own official art sought to define